Local governments and agencies must balance the dual, and sometimes conflicting, demands of incident management in the general purpose lanes and use of the HOV lanes. Diversion of general purpose lane traffic to underutilized HOV lanes, while suspending use policies, is applied occasionally throughout the nation. Unlike incident management on general purpose lanes, though, standards for HOV diversion decisions are lacking at almost all HOV lane operators. The purpose of this paper is to provide guidelines for the use of traffic diversion from general purpose lanes to HOV lanes. Primary data was collected and correlated to a literature review, providing an up-to-date review of diversion policies for various HOV operators. Using travel time analysis conducted for four HOV lanes in the Houston area, travel-time savings from the use of diversion to HOV lanes were determined for three primary incident types in general purpose lanes. Sixteen scenarios were developed with four topical categories: HOV demand, general purpose lane demand, severity of incident, and lane blockage. From these scenarios, a qualitative tool was developed for in-field agents to use in evaluating the appropriateness of diverting general purpose lane traffic to HOV lanes.
Samenvatting